PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
3.
"It is not time for reflection, but for
evocation. The responsibility of the in-
tellectual is the same as that of the
street organizer, the draft resister, the
digger: to talk to people, not about
them."
Andrew Kopkind—New York
Review of Books
The age of Aristotelian cathartic art is over—that art that
allowed for the release of dammed-up emotions, returning
the individual to his old environment and his old self, free
of that which had been disturbing him. (Going to church to
get happy.) We are no longer contained within the realm of
the proscenium stage, with its single point of view. We have
proceeded from point of view, which allows one to exercise
his sight or hearing without the need to act; to happening,
which creates a situation of total sensory involvement for a
limited time within a limited space; to total environmentsomething
that "happens" all the time without any limitations
as to time or space (the continuous theater of the street).
We can see the same progression in the psychoanalytic
world as it moved from individual therapy to group therapy
to marathon (twenty-four-to-thirty-six-hour sessions) to a situ-
ation similar to that of Synanon, wherein the encounter goes
on continuously, twenty-four hours a day, until the individual
is converted—Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunst functioning
within a totally controlled environment (Bayreuth) that al-
lows for the experience of conversion. We live in the age of
the true believer.
The stage of catharsis (classical tragedy) developed into
the Wagnerian idea of conversion, wherein the energy is re-
leased, then redirected within the structure of the situation
Brecht's concept of the epic theater is a further stage of
this development—a concept that has influenced Artaud.
Warhol, and any number of psychedelic entertainers. They,
however, differ from Wagner in operating on principles of in